Cosmopolitanism and the colonial disease: Stories and belonging in Parisian slam poetry

Cicilie Fagerlid (UiO)

“I’ve sublimated the language of Molière without ever offending it… Which politician dares to tell me that I’m not French?” states the slam poet Souleymane Diamanka. Poetically, he calls himself “inhabitant of nowhere, originating from everywhere”. The more down-to-earth description he sometimes gives is “a Fulani from Bordeaux”. Souleymane is not the only poet on the Parisian slam scene who brings stories with him from elsewhere while firmly planted in French soil. Personal experiences like tracing one’s ancestors to Fulani storytellers or reworking the traumas of fleeing from the war in Cambodia are transformed into home-grown, however cosmopolitan Frenchness in the mouth of the locally situated and often streetwise poets.

The Parisian slam/performance poetry sessions take place in small bars and cafés. Here, young and old people of a variety of backgrounds come together to listen to each other’s short texts. Through the participatory and democratic ethos of “expressing oneself”, “sharing” and “listening to others” a space of cosmopolitan coexistence is created. In this presentation, I will explore how this space comes into being, what makes it cosmopolitan and what kinds of experiences it makes available for the people present. I will claim that cosmopolitanism should be understood as an orientation rather than an identity. It is an orientation that is capable of bringing about transformations in the self as well as in self-other relations, and it bothgenerates and is generated by openness in encounters. Can listening to other people’s stories of other places and other ways of being French cure the French colonial disease?

The presentation is based on 16 months of fieldwork in ethnically and socio-economically mixed North-eastern Paris, from the riots in the autumn 2005 until the presidential election in 2007.
Time: 25 February, 13.15-15.00
Venue: Uni Rokkansenteret, Nygårdsgaten 5, 6. etg (5th Floor)
SEMINAR POSTER